The Animal Farm Project on VoiceThread

VoiceThread has been a wonderful tool to use with middle school students. As the library media specialist, I have used VoiceThread with students to engage and motivate them, introduce topics, curate research and information, and develop unit portfolios. VoiceThread is one of my go-to web tools because it is simple to use, efficient, and adaptable.

Recently, I was working with language arts’ students who were researching the Russian Revolution, so they could better understand the allegorical novel, Animal Farm by George Orwell. The teachers placed students in small groups of 3 or 4 and each group was assigned a historical figure or topic from the Russian Revolution to research. The students conducted research, compiled information and wrote a script that was recorded in VoiceThread. The students also chose pictures related to their figure/topic they uploaded to their VoiceThread in an effort help their fellow students better understand the historical figure/topic. The last step was to narrate their script across the various slides. Each group shared their VoiceThread with their fellow students who then watched and took notes on the historical figures and topics that they had not researched. We could have chosen other ways to present this historical information, but VoiceThread allowed us to learn and teach a lot of information in a short amount of time. Throughout the entire process students were engaged and the onus of responsibility had been shifted from the teacher to the students who were responsible, not only their own learning, but for educating their peers. VoiceThread is extremely user-friendly, so the learning curve was minimal and I did not have to spend a lot of time teaching the students how to use it.

This past fall another language arts teacher and I decided to combine story writing, narration, and illustration with makerspace. We used VoiceThread to publish and share the student’s stories. Student’s paired up with a co-author and wrote a bold action story incorporating the necessary plot elements. Once their bold action story was complete the students divided their story into chunks and used Legos to create 3-4 pixel art images that coordinated with their chunks. Students took pictures of their pixel art and uploaded them to VoiceThread. They narrated their story and shared them with their classmates. The entire process of story writing became fun for our middle schoolers who were engaged from beginning to end and were excited and proud of their final product.

About the Author:

Timothy Thomas is the library media specialist at Hereford Middle School for Baltimore County Public Schools and sees his job as having three equal parts: promoting literacy, co-teaching, and community building. As a self identified Renaissance man Timothy loves to learn and being a library media specialist feeds into this love of learning and allows him to share it with his students. You can follow Tim **@**Library_HMS on Twitter.